Translator’s Note

Fatemeh Shams’s poem on struggling to maintain a grasp on one’s native tongue while living in a foreign language contains a riddle. In Persian, “Shin” (the letter sh) and “Noon” (the letter n) would spell the word shen or “sand,” in which the poet is sinking as she longingly looks toward the ocean she once crossed into a new country and a foreign language. (Shams has lived most of her adult life in exile from Iran, first in Europe and now in the United States.) The chosen letters are telling in other ways. Shin is the first letter of the poet’s last name: a crisis in language is a crisis in identity. Noon strikes somehow even closer to home; as a colloquialism for Nan, it recalls one of the first phrases students learn to write in Iran, perhaps even before learning to write their own names: Baba ab dad, maman nan dad. Father brought water, mother brought bread.